The Spirituality of Literature Learning

   It's interesting how, in the process of preparing a lesson plan for young students, I start to realize the 'hidden spirit' of lesson plans! While doing a lesson plan for Treasure Island by R.L. Stevenson, I suddenly started to reflect upon how the process of doing this is in itself a journey, similar to what the boy Jim Hawkes experiences when he is with his comrades looking for treasures in Stevenson's classic. In order for me to find this parallel, however, I had to go back to my experiences as an undergraduate English major, and delve beneath the sleek surfaces of what the narrative ostensibly describes. What does this require, however? What experience will take me below the surface of literal meaning and toward something that has a more in-depth meaning?
    Part of what drives all of this is the sense of using a text to serve others in some way or another. This, to me, is the role of the English literature teacher. Rather than simply presenting a book summary to a classroom, English teachers will use the material of literature to serve the learning needs of their students, the latter taking precedence over the contents of the former. If what I am presenting only encourages memorization or (worse still) consulting Wikipedia for plot summaries, then I haven't served learners well: I haven't given them an invitation to discover what learning is and means for them, but have,  instead, put the text in front of the learner and said "here is what you have to learn." What would literature be like if, however, the reader became the center of the study rather than the so-called 'objective' contents of the text? This, to me, is where literature is exciting, because the text itself is only the vehicle through which students can really explore who they are. In fact, this is allegorically expressed through the narrator of Treasure Island, who also experiences a personal journey in spite of the fact that he appears to be fighting it out with Long John Silver for a chest of treasure. The 'goal' is not as important as the journey, even if the journey is not complete or aborts midway.
    It's important to work with the text in this way, because otherwise literature can be nothing more than regurgitating the details which can easily be found on wikipedia. Literature is not about reading meaning off the page, but about wrestling with the meanings within, or often undergoing the confusions and misunderstandings that readers often feel when facing another person's thoughts on paper. It's more of an inner process that differs from person to person.